The real stories from inside the F1 paddock

En route to Paris

Here I am back at Eurotunnel, bound for Paris, where on Wednesday the next round of the current F1 political saga will take place. Will the FIA World Council members support Max Mosley against “the loonies” or will they tut-tut and suggest that the time has come for Mosley to find a Bath chair somewhere quiet. My feeling is that the council will probably support him as their careers within the FIA are bound to his. However these kind of club people are generally very political and if they smell the scent of blood in the water they can jump, in order to be on the winning side.

The word in F1 circles is that a big part will be played by Michel Boeri, a lawyer from Monaco, who has headed the Automobile Club there since 1972. His only real aim is to ensure that Monaco retains the prestige of having the Monte Carlo Rally and the Monaco GP but he is too old for the job himself. What he knows is that the Prince will not be happy if he messes up as much of Monaco’s income depends on tourism. So… which side will he be on? Will he want to see the Monaco GP being disputed between a Manor and a Campos, or would he perhaps prefer Ferrari versus McLaren? His crowd is made up largely of Italians…

Also at the World Council will be Bernie Ecclestone and Luca do Montezemolo to help with the arguments. FOTA says it does not care what happens as it will continue to plan for a rival series.

A year ago Max Mosley won a vote of confidence regarding his management style at the FIA. Well, boil it down and that is what it meant: the federation accepted that it was acceptable that the president could do what he liked in his private life. No-one asked whether it was a good thing that Max’s unusual tastes were a secret and thus that he might have been vulnerable to blackmail and such things. This is one reason that politicians and bishops resign when caught in whatever act they are caught doing.

Let us forget others questions about whether the sport was brought into disrepute… This is a broad term.

The fact was that Mosley won the vote and an Arab gentleman later admitted that he had personally organized the necessary votes. A few months later said gent became FIA Vice President. These sort of things say much about the way an organisation works. You can call it politics if you like…

The aim in politics is to be in power. Being in opposition is dull.

At the time a number of big FIA clubs expressed their distaste at the result of the no confidence vote. They are still out there and they may think that once again they to try to remove Mosley. They might not. Who knows? They might also see a breakaway in F1 as being an opportunity. FOTA needs a sanctioning body and would be quite entitled to ask the American Automobile Association if it would like be run the AAA Formula 1 World Championship. No-one owns the rights to that. The FIA might then decide to expel the AAA but in doing so it would wipe out 50% of it’s membership as the AAA is a huge club. And there might be other clubs happy to join a rival US-inspired federation. I am not saying this will happen, rather that it could… So the FIA World Council members must bear these sort of things in mind when they get into their discussions about F1.

I have no idea what will happen in the months ahead, except to say that from a commercial point of view I will be reporting on whichever series has Ferrari and Monaco.

That is business. I hope that it will still be an FIA series as it seems madness to two series when one is quite enough.

Share this:

Related

13 Responses

Why does everyone keep talking about two championships, about the damage that was done when Champ and IRL split. When they split they had roughly equal assets.

This is not the same. FOTA have it all, the big teams and now the best of the new teams and sooner or later Williams and Force India will join them. If FOTA do their own series there will be no FIA series, at least not as far as the general public are concerned. The FIA series will be a joke.

> FOTA needs a sanctioning body and would be quite entitled to
> ask the American Automobile Association if it would like to run
> the AAA Formula 1 World Championship. No-one owns the
> rights to that.

I understand that the FIA cannot keep the AAA from running any ‘World Championship’, but can’t B.C. Ecclestone stop them from running a ‘Formula 1’ championship? I thought that anything remotely linked to ‘F1’ is Bernie’s.

“FOTA needs a sanctioning body and would be quite entitled to ask the American Automobile Association if it would like be run the AAA Formula 1 World Championship. No-one owns the rights to that. The FIA might then decide to expel the AAA but in doing so it would wipe out 50% of it’s membership as the AAA is a huge club. And there might be other clubs happy to join a rival US-inspired federation.”

I think that would be the smartest move for the sport regardless if Max keeps his job or not. If they moved the series’ headquarters to America, FOTA or FOM could run the series any way they like. See over here, we don’t have as many of those pesky governance laws for sports. I think an arrangement that we could see with a new Formula One series is the arrangement that NASCAR has. NASCAR is technically its’ own sanctioning body. The IRL is also sanctions their own series. Technically, AAA hasn’t sanctioned a race since the LeMans disaster. After the disaster, they handed most of those responsibilities to the United States Automotive Club which since the early 80’s has been a complete joke. That is not to say that AAA would get back into the game, (especially to stick it to Max) but I see AAA role more as a blessing rather than an all enveloping legislative body.

Joe,
Have we been keeping track of how many dates have been set, declarations made and now Mosley says they’re talking, FOTA says they’re going forward with their planning (one can only hope) and we’re still at it.

The opportunities to really move forward are slipping by. If FOTA does move on, can Bernie be far behind. The F1 that remains will be an all Cosworth powered field ala the IRL (Honda). It doesn’t seem, based on responses in your column and others, that the fans care for the scenario as proposed by the FIA. F1 has been more about technology, team work and the drivers. As we see, the best driver does not always win but the contest includes more than a driver.

If one were to promulgate some new rules (and let them be for a few years) one that might actually advance automotive design and “might” allow for some transferable benefit would be a fuel restriction. Such as requiring 8 mpg with freedom for innovation in all other areas. Of course, there will have to be some standards such as wheel size, weight minima, etc. But, in a 200 mile race (321.87 km), 8 mpg (3.4 km/litre) would provide 25 gallons (94.64 litres) for each car. Refueling? Optional but who would want to under these circumstances.

Leave engines open, aero aids such as movable wings, air brakes (ala Mercedes) open. Will this be cheaper? It could be if you allow FOTA to settle on a cost figure. It seems that they were driving towards something more reasonable than the current figures.

In season testing, why not. If there is no testing, other than straight line, when someone has a big head start it makes it more difficult to close a gap. There will be plenty of things to consider but the agreement that is needed is on the concept. If there is a fuel limitation and little else, there will be a diversity of cars on the grid which showcase, not only driver talents but those of the rest of the team as F1 has always done.

There would not be any objective response from a Mosley or some others because the struggle is about power for Max, Money for Bernie and a little of each for FOTA. Most of us seem to agree that those who make the product should have a significant say in certain things.
So, a proposal for fuel restriction with plenty of details to work out allowing for other freedoms could be interesting.

I had said words to the effect that FOTA may be able to get help from the American side to setup a series and run it on Keith Collantine’s site.
Obviously i did not say it as succinctly as you Joe.
It is going to be a very interesting few months as we see both sides lobbying against each other.
The one thing i do believe though, is that any racing series FOTA organise will have to be able to secure free to air tv feeds if it wants any chance of success. Otherwise it will die. If they can only get a pay to view service , such as Sky Sports then it will not be shown to enough fans to make it succesful. Perhaps the current tv deals with FOM may have a clause allowing each tv station to change which series it wants to cover. The BBC covers a wide area of the globe and would be a huge obstacle to the FOTA series if they could not show the racing free to air. I’m sure these tv stations will have paid huge amounts to be given the right to air F1, and they would not get as many viewers should formula one run with many lesser known teams and drivers.
They would want to show the premier series not a substandard one.

“Motorcycle must be made available for sale for a period of 75 minutes following the completion of the race for a price of £20,000 ($33,000 USD). Refusal to sell the motorcycle upon receiving a legitimate bid results in disqualification from the race.”

This is from the rules for the Open Class of the recent TTxGP – the electric motorcycle Tourist Trophy that formed part of this year’s Isle of Man TT races. (http://www.egrandprix.com/)

Now I’m not suggesting that each F1 car should be available for sale at the end of each race (perhaps at the end of the season?) and obviously $33,000 isn’t much on which to run a racing team, but the principal is an interesting one, because it means the FIA do not need to examine the books of the teams. Under such a rule, the teams could be self-limiting.

The justification for Formula One has in the past been technical innovation. Ironically, as rules are tightened and innovation is stragled, costs go up, not down because chasing tiny incremental benefits is very expensive.
Bernie should know this: the fan car was a very low cost development, for instance, relatively speaking.
Max Mosley certainly doesn’t.
I suspect that FOTA does realise this and wants to get back to an era where ingenuity and innovation play a significant role in the racing.

Lustigson, no, Bernie would just like people to think that it is. The UK courts have specifically turned down his attempt to copyright the term “Formula 1” and that has been taken as a precedent in the legal jurisdictions of most developed nations. Only China has ever backed FOM in a copyright case…

I am gob smacked that Max would be going for another term. But the key question is who will have the gumption to run against him for the FIA job. I only get CAR magazine here in the US occasionally, and still have a 2002 issue where he was saying he’d be stepping down at the end of that term. The man’s integrity is totally absent.

I also agree with previous statement regarding spec series, and the absurdity of it. The variety of designs and engines and encouragement of innovation and improvement are huge parts of F1, and along with everything else make F1 so much better than ever other series save for LeMans-type cars (and even they are doing goofy tweaks to rules associated with the runaway success of the Diesels in the LMP2 class.)

But even if Mad Max is gone the CVC and troll-ish Bernie are alienating fans, and making the sport look like a joke by chasing the €, and going to dubious races over capacity crowds with fans who enjoy the race. even the last USGP had large crowds >100,000 with people from all over the western hemisphere and ex-pats from Brazil, Europe and other F1 crazed countries. Also you can’t find too many F1 teams that do not have US based sponsors or sponsors that have a large presence here. why ignore the North American Market.

For all of the gripes against indy, It is certainly more accessable than Watkins Glen was. The airport is less than 15 miles from the speedway. Plus the Speedway/Indy 500 was an event in the F1 calendar back in the early days of the Formula one. Lastly, it is relatively centrally located so that people from both coasts can get there. Anything on the west coast is relatively isolated from the majority of the US population, and there’s no where on the east coast that would really work, maybe they can do orlando and have both disney world and Euro disney for France, then if Fuji drops out they can do Tokyo Disneyland and rebrand it the DisCorp WC F1.